Just this past weekend, Google's popular blog-creation tool, Blogger, was targeted in an apparently coordinated effort to create more than 13,000 splogs, the search giant said. The splogs were laced with popular keywords so that they would appear prominently in blog searches, and several bloggers complained online that that the splogs were gumming up searches for legitimate sites.

Many spammers are buying special software on the Web that allows them to automatically create scores of phony blogs in mere seconds. One program cited by splog critics is BlogBurner, which starts at $47 a month. The tool "creates a unique blog for your Web site in less than one minute -- even if you know nothing about computers," according to the BlogBurner.com site. BlogBurner's founder, Rick Butts, denies that his software is used by spammers. He says it is used by business owners to automatically create blogs based on content pulled from their Web sites. He acknowledges that the blogs being created by BlogBurner are often used to help draw attention to a company's main Web site. "I'm not going to pretend to say we're altruistically creating blogs for humans to read," he says, adding that other companies have mimicked his software and sold it to spammers.

The WSJ article also takes a brief look at another issue, some might call it a problem, involving blogs, spam posted in the comments section of blogs.

The scope of the attack, and the sophisticated automation used to accomplish it, mark a turning point for splogging, a problem experts say has been building for some time.

Unlike e-mail programs, blogging services don't have the capability to easily detect and filter out spam, said Bob Wyman, chief technology officer at blog search and tracking service PubSub.

[Google's Jason] Goldman [product manager for Blogger], admitted that the weekend attack showed that those preventative tools are "broken" and serve as deterrents rather than outright solutions. He also said Google launched a feature Wednesday that would force suspected spammers to transcribe distorted words before pushing through individual blog posts. And he said Google is not alone in being attacked. "Weblogs in general are having a problem with spam right now, not just Blogger," he said. "While it is a problem, it is certainly not the majority case on BlogSpot, at all."